Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/562

 in his teens; the man experiencing only an intenser sexual passion as the boy becomes a young man. Often grown wholly dionian, never being thoroughly an "inborn" type, the youth becomes cold toward anything but real friendship with his senior friend, and is more and more averse to their sexualities, Soon some one woman takes possession of his fancy. The mysterious uranian relationship falls to sudden ruin. A homosexual of refined and constant type, whose ideal is once thus met and possessed and broken, can have all the rest of his life shattered. Sometimes, at least, the Uranian has enough force of character, unselfishness of love and philosophy; and therewith he accepts his fate. He will not oppose the happiness of the being he so profoundly loves.

But the lover-friend to be deserted does not always accept the situation; nor assent to an engagement and a marriage without something more than anguish and- pleading. In an English city,, „several ago, an engagement of some social prominence was broken off, on account of a cause peculiarly unpleasing—the reluctant conviction of the fiancé that the young lady had misconducted herself; had been in particular intimacy with another man—deceased. But the truth came to light, out of all doubt, that the most intimate friend of the engaged man had been the calumniator and even a forger in the affair, because of homosexual jealousy; in his determination to "bring back" the deserter from their intimacy. A more tragic case of such interference, through similar jealousy, occurred in Birnbaum, in Posen, in 1903. Herr Karl T—, the presiding judge of one of the city's tribunals, a man in the early thirties, a social favourite, much respected, prosperous and well, committed suicide; apparently without reason for it. He had recently become engaged to a young lady of one of the best town-families, who loved him with all her heart, and had not any cause to doubt Herr T—'s sentiment for her. The